Since their discovery, high-temperature superconductors have found a variety of uses in industry. Unfortunately, some high-temperature superconducting materials suffer a number of shortfalls including a limited maximum current capacity, super-conductivity must be limited to a particular direction relative to the crystalline structure of the superconducting material and such crystalline structures tend to lose orientation when grown beyond a thickness Δc.
A possible approach to realigning crystal orientation of bulk superconducting devices has been to disperse thin layers of a substrate between layers of the superconducting material in a manner that looks like a layer cake. In such formations, each layer of superconducting material may act as an independent device.